November 17, 2011

If your holiday vacation plans include Seattle: please enjoy the rain. Also, please enjoy this “Seattle for Map Geeks” guide that I recently wrote for CBS, including four points of geographic interest in the Emerald City.

Now that I look at some of the other “Best of” pieces, I think I may have misunderstood the concept a little bit: they wanted local content, which probably means I should have picked some off-the-beaten-path stuff that even locals wouldn’t know about (like my second destination, the “Seattle Centroid”). Instead, two of my four picks are big tourist attractions, and a third is right next to one. But hey, Seattleites’ loss is your gain.

Oh, I don’t think I ever linked to this Roger Craig video, where he explains some of the software tools that helped him win the recent Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. Full disclosure: Roger also let me monkey with his cramming site in the weeks leading up to the Watson match, and I thought it was a huge help getting me back in game mode. In fact, one of the testimonial quotes at the end of the video comes from me. Sigh, if only I’d been playing Tom Nissley and Buddy Wright instead of Brad Rutter and an evil supercomputer. And found all the Daily Doubles.